I recently spent the morning at an event led by NatWest, bringing business owners, funders and advisors together to explore where to turn when looking for funding.
These events can be quite similar, with speakers explaining how difficult raising finance is and that you absolutely need their services to help you. Or why they are better than all the others (funders and advisors). This was refreshingly different.
From the outset, people seemed genuinely interested in getting to know each other. The panel of funders all shared their experiences and advice, which was not only clear, but could be practically actioned as a take-away from the session. There was no jostling for position or arguments, just pure support.
There were a few takeaways that I felt were elevated above the rest, being:
👀 Prepare early – don’t wait until you are down to your last tenner to look for funding, ensure you have line of sight to your cashflow requirements.
💰 Understand the different types of finance – there may be many ways of obtaining cash and those partners will have varying levels of support.
📣 Keep your pitch deck simple – the deck was compared to a trailer to pique the interest of potential funders, rather than the whole feature film!
🗣 Speak with other founders – usually, founders are more than willing to support other founders and they may have good intel on potential partners and learnings from their own journey.
Even with the huge amount of information available to us, it was clear from speaking with business owners that they still wanted to work with someone who they could trust. To help them ask the right questions at the right time, and ultimately make an informed decision.
Will that be driven by AI in the future? All I can say is that there was no shortage of knowledgeable people in that room, and anyone looking to raise finance in the future should be asking questions now.
Author: Jake Standing, Director
Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog owner and do not represent those of Plus Accounting. All content provided in this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site.
Date published: 02 October 2023